Barry Yourgrau spoke with Steven Shainberg, director of "Secretary," the much-acclaimed movie fable about twisted (?) love and love's twists. It's Shainberg's second feature, his first being "Hit Me," from a script by Denis Johnson. This conversation took place at Bar 6 in downtown New York on January 20.

BLEAKNESS, SWEETIE

BARRY YOURGRAU: Mary Gaitskill's original story, "Secretary," seems to be very different than the movie.

STEVEN SHAINBERG: Yeah. Mary's story ends with the girl being destroyed by her experience with the lawyer. Well for a long time, as I was thinking about how this gets expanded to a feature (if it could be!), I was kind of hooked on that trajectory--

BY: Which trajectory?

SS: The trajectory of bleakness. Where she is ruined essentially and haunted forever by this essentially bad man. Basically, an abusive guy. And then I saw Mike Leigh's movie, "Life is Sweet," and Jane Campion's movie, "Sweetie." "Sweetie" deals with having a mentally ill sibling, but It's a comedy! And It's fun! And even when It's incredibly touching and sad, there's still playfulness. And the same is true about Mike Leighs? movie. There's an enormous unhappiness, but It's also very playful. And those two movies clicked something in my mind. Whereby I could flip the tone of "Secretary" and the "negative eventuality" of that character. Suddenly I thought: Why couldn't this be a good thing? And if it was a good thing, what would happen? And how would it be a good thing?

BY: That was your inspiration and not the screenwriter's?

SS: Yeah. By the time I took it, I had made a short film of this, like seven years ago--

BY: What was it called?

SS: It was called "Secretary," it was like 22 minutes long --

BY: It was like your "Slingblade"--

SS: Exactly. It was my "Slingblade." I tried to get the movie developed on the basis of that short, and nobody wanted to do it. Part of the reason was, it was bleak, it was depressing, it was morose. It was all the things that Mary's story was. So when I came back to it, years later after seeing the Leigh film and the Campion movie, I personally was very different. I was a lot happier in my life. And I didn't see this kind of activity as necessarily horrible, scary, dark and ugly--

BY: Why?

SS: Because, um, I don't think it is. I mean I just don't think--

BY: Did you--was there any particular insight, research or experience that led you to that?--other than just being "older"?

SS: Well, A, being older. And also, you know, [Playfully lowers voice] having experience, Barry, in these realms, I didn't experience them myself as--

BY: No, I'm serious--

SS: Yeah. No, I did not experience these sorts of things as, say, as the way in which they're normally portrayed--

LIBERATION, TENDER SPANKING

BY: You talk about the sort of relationships pictured in the movie--these activities, are you talking about bondage? Are you talking about S&M?

SS: Well, even more generally, the way in which power functions. For example, all relationships involve some kind of power exchange, moment to moment, day to day. And that's always shifting, obviously. One of the things that interests me--for a variety of reasons--is the exertion of influence that one person can have on another. And the fact that sometimes the most violent and aggressive experiences are in fact liberating. They may not feel that way at the moment you're having them. But you realize that something was broken open in you. And I think that there a kind of sentimental cliche that the best things that happen are always overtly tender and kind and gentle?. So when Mr. Gray [the lawyer] hits her--

BY: And spanks her--

SS: And spanks her--

BY: He never hits her actually, he spanks her--

SS: Spanks her. But that is from my point of view a potentially tender gesture. It can have the same meaning that we normally ascribe to a tender gesture. For example, if you read books on "infants need to be touched," right? A touch can have any kind of meaning! It can mean "I'll see you later," it can mean "Stick with me on this," it can mean, "I love you." It can mean "I'm going to kill you" (if you're mafioso). And similarly a spanking can mean a lot of different things too. And in a certain way, one of the things about the Gaitskill story that fascinated me is that the story was what was you would expect of these two people. And I like to find the unexpected!--the meaning that might be uncovered if you look at things from a completely different angle. So that was all sort of rattling around in my brain when I thought you know, a young woman having this experience in the office could love it -- [Joking] a lot of them do. [Laughs]

BY: Stop right there! [Laughs]

NO ALEC, NO REESE

BY: When you were starting to work on the script, who were the actors in your mind?

SS: My first two choices for the guy were Michael Keaton and Alec Baldwin. I originally I saw him as a more physically imposing person. And I think the fact that they said no and then we went to James Spader was a great thing for the movie. It was lucky.

BY: I agree. For me, Maggie Gyllenhaal was wonderful, but Spader was just the heart of the film. He almost carried the whole burden that people would be feeling beneath this "fairy tale."

SS: I know. And It's funny, because obviously he hasn't gotten the kind of attention she has, partially because she's new and she's "the young girl." And she goes through the huge arc in the film, so I understand that, It's her story. But It's his story too. I mean he's entirely changed by her coming into the office. So I don't know, I do wish that he'd gotten a little bit more attention. But I think to some extent people feel like, Oh, It's Spader in another sort of "sexually odd film" and another "creepy weirdo." But this guy [in the film] is more than that, obviously. And so I wish people had paid attention to that.

EYES POPPING OUT OF MY HEAD

BY: How'd you come to Maggie Gyllenhaal?

SS: You know, its just of those things where the right person appears--really the right person appears at the right time, for the right part, with the right filmmakers. Like Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves." We had our list of all the usual suspects--

BY: Who else was on the list?

SS: For example, anybody you would think of, like Samantha Morton or Reese Witherspoon, anybody you--

BY: Reese Witherspoon?

SS: No, we went to all these people--

BY: You would have dyed her Reese's hair though, right?

SS: We would have done anything to get any of these people. But we anticipated that they would all pass, and so in the meantime I looked at about probably 60, 70 girls and--

BY: What was the audition like?

SS: We did the first interview scene, where she comes in to get the job. And we did the scene with Jeremy Davies, Peter in the movie, when they go out on a date to the Laundromat. Because that was such a different relationship. But we didn't do any of the, you know, sex stuff. Or any of that.

BY: I interrupted, you said you saw 60, 70 girls--

SS: Yeah. But here's the amazing thing: Maggie was the first one. She was number one. She came in, the first one, and I read her, we talked, we worked on the scenes, she left the room. And I turned to the casting director and my eyes were popping out of my head. And we both just burst out laughing, because the first girl who came in was the girl! And we knew it, we knew it. So I called the producers, and I said, Listen, you know, we?ve never worked together before, and you're gonna think I'm crazy--but the first girl was the girl! So we all got kind of excited and they looked at the tape, Andy [Andrew Fierberg] and his partner, Amy [Amy Hobby]. And they were kind of lukewarm on it. And I said, I'm telling you, this girl is supertalented, you weren't in the room with her, I was, she's amazing! But you're never going to just, OK, say, "Fine," you know. So we went and saw another 30 people, and then I brought Maggie back, and she was definitely the best. And I saw another 30, 40 girls, brought Maggie back again. It took six, seven months to get all the no's, and finally to say: You know what, I would rather do this movie with a totally unknown girl than a girl who is not an A-list money actress but who's going to deliver our budget. Let's take Maggie to Spader and see if he'll do the movie with her.

SPADER

BY: And?

SS: I met with him in LA and he said, at the end of the meeting, "So who'd you want to play the girl?" Anticipating that I would say, you know, some star. And I said, Listen, just give me 24 hours, take these tapes home, these are her auditions, this girl has basically done nothing--she's the girl I want! And he called me that night and he said, Absolutely. I love her, she's amazing! I'm in. So it's to his credit, there are a lot of other actors who would have said, "I'm not going to do a movie with some girl I've never heard of!"

BY: Was Mary Gaitskill happy with the way the movie looked in terms of the story?

SS: Well, you know, I think Mary looks at the movie and says, It's not my story. And on the other hand she's happy with the film. There's something about it that's, in some way, true, oddly true, about the movie. That there's a sense of humor in Mary's turn of phrase--

BY: Again, the film's very different from the story--

SS: Extremely different--

BY: Because you made it into a fable about self-fulfillment--

SS: But if you read all the stories in "Bad Behavior" [Gaitskill story collection] the whole book is in some way about the--I don't want to necessarily say "happy discovery"-- but at least the discovery of a hidden sexual amusement park. The book is fantastic.

BY: That's a great title: "Hidden Sexual Amusement Park."

SS: Yeah, that's what it is. So in that sense, It's somewhat true to it. Also, Mary's story is all of 12-13 pages, so It's just an incident. So you have to do stuff.

CUTTINGS

BY: So was there a lot of improvising on set?

SS: Zero.

BY: Any closed sets?

SS: Yeah, basically, any time you would think the set would be closed, it was. For all the stuff between them. In fact for a lot of stuff you wouldn't think you'd want a closed set, we did. They are in that room alone together, and the more we could make them feel like they were in the room together, the better off they were.

BY: Did you rehearse the shit out of it?

SS: Maggie and I spent about 5 or 6 weeks every afternoon together for like 2-3 hours. Just her and me. We didn't have Spader, he was on another movie.

BY: Did all the stuff about mutilating, which had tremendous veracity, did that come out of Erin [screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson], did that come out of you?

SS: Well, actually, there was an article in the New York Times Magazine years ago, about girls who do this. And I'd cut it out thinking it was always something that interested me.

BY: So you spend your time cutting out articles about people cutting themselves?

SS: [Laughs] I've got massive files, not all on cutting ?

BY: Sorry to tear you away from your files!

SS: Yeah, my voluminous files. So yeah, it was just one of the things that was, you know, being tossed in the air as something that might figure into this movie. Maybe. We considered a lot of different ways to go. We did like 25 drafts together.

FAIRY TALES, TOTALLY CREEPY

BY: Had you worked with Erin before?

SS: No, she's a playwright. She'd never written a script. She was a good friend of mine. And if you read her plays, it makes sense why I chose her to work with on this. She deals with sexually frustrated ambiguous troubled people, but with a kind of innocence and compassion that was really appealing.

BY: The fable structure, which is what the film turned out to be, is a good fit with that kind of innocence--

SS: Absolutely. [Laughs] Look, in the script we had her in a red riding hood when she comes into his office and, yeah, it was really too much! Thankfully we changed everything that was red into purple. Which I think helped us. But still, obviously we're invoking fairy tales, I mean all the way through the movie. Desperately invoking them. It's funny, you know, because these decisions make you accept the otherwise salacious subject matter. A lot of producers, when they read the script they thought, This is going to be totally creepy! And who wants to see this, and It's exploitative, and on and on.

BY: Did you get a lot of people saying this is exploitative and degrading?

SS: When they read the script, yeah. They were afraid of that.

BY: Was that an issue you were very concerned to protect yourself on? That you needed to bolster Maggie's character ?

SS: Yeah, well one of the things about her is that she's not a person who gets taken advantage of, Maggie or Lee [her character]. When she gets spanked the first time in that office, you see her make that decision to stay? that moment when she stays there, and he says, Read it [her mistyped letter] again, and she does and he continues, and their hands touch and she looks at him with a look of relief. And joy. In some way, she's in such an outrageous situation that my feeling is, watching the scene, she does have the wherewithal to get out of that room. And she chooses not to. And I think if it had been anybody who as a person you feel is weak or a wallflower or really damaged, I don't think you'd feel the same way about that character. I think there something about Maggie that gets us over a hump.

BY: And as you say, the film is ultimately about connection.

SS: And I think that the emotional recognitions that occur aren't simplistic. He [Spader] is not just seeing something about her, he's seeing something about himself, and the potential of the two of them. And then he's reacting to the potential with fear and acceptance. I love the moments when we're just with him. When we see how barely held together with pins and flywheels he really is.

BY: And the difficult scenes, to shoot? In terms of intimate scenes?

SS: The hard scene was between Maggie and James when he fires her. Because there's so many difficult transitions emotionally. She comes into the room, she thinks they're playing a sex game, he is in an entirely different place, he tells her, she doesn't understand what's going on, she gets very upset, she slaps him, she stands up to him, he retreats, she goes to him. There's just a lot of flip-flops that have to occur in both of them. So just from a did-that-moment-work? angle, that was the scene I was most concerned about.

BY: Was she fun to work with, Maggie?

SS: Oh yeah she a total joy. She's completely present, she's so smart. She realized what she had, you know. And she just came to play. It was forty days of being there.

BY: And Jeremy Davies, he was sensational? like a puppy almost.

SS: Yeah, and if he's a puppy, then James is like a machine built sort of like a battle weary killer. It worked out great.

THE USE OF THE WORD "FUCK"

BY: And the film's ending, lifting above realism like that--

SS: If the film didn't become something overtly metaphoric, I think it would be a much less interesting movie.

BY: It's funny, I found the moments when she was reading a book about bondage or something--I found that naming the relationship, the way the world would, just brought me to earth a bit about it. Because I loved how the relationship was so intense and obvious--but metaphoric.

SS: I agree--

BY: Because what interrupted was for me when he [Spader] said, when he was about to masturbate on her and he said, don't worry, I'm not going to fuck you. And the use the word "fuck" there--

SS: It's great.

BY: Well, for me it again "brought it to earth"--

SS: Oh, I loved that. That's my favorite section! Here's my reason: what I like about that is that It's violent. The way that word comes in, and the way he says it with this definitiveness--

SS: I understand what you're saying. I like it because it does remind you, it jolts you-- Fuck!?-- that these are not animated characters. These are real people who do fuck. Who do have a connection to the dirt, the earth. I like the fact one of the things the audience experiences watching the movie, which I take extreme pleasure in, is this fear the audience has when they are shown what the real subject matter of the movie is. They get a little nervous, like how ugly is it gonna get? Is he gonna take me to a place that makes me really uncomfortable? And touching that edge a little bit--not a lot, but a little bit--with a word like "Fuck," at that moment, I think is good for the audience. I think if you pull back too much there, some of the tension and the energy in the theater gets deflated, if you're too nice. This would be my argument, if you were a studio executive and you were saying, Can't we loop in the word, "Penetrate"--

BY: Yeah but --

SS: This is an interesting topic--

BY: Yeah. Look, in "The Sadness of Sex" we did a whole scene that's essentially a celebration of cunnilingus, It's all about licking a woman's pussy, and I never used the word "cunnilingus," I never used the word "pussy." But It's clear what I'm talking about--

SS: I think that's great [laughs]--I want you to e-mail me that!

BY: For me It's a pet issue. I mean, [in the scene] the guy's gonna jerk off on her, we know that's what's going on, you don't need to say "Fuck"--you know?

SS: I understand what you're saying. [But] I think you gain from it. That moment for example, after that scene, she goes into the bathroom and says, "Put your cock in my mouth," all those things-- I think that stuff makes the audiences eyes pop out of their head. Because it is shocking and yet endearing and playful. And It's sexy! All of those things, simultaneously. I'm interested in things that can do more than one thing, that more than one thing is happening at the moment you're seeing it. That to me is really exciting. I think, to a large extent, movies are too simplistic. One of the fun things about making a movie like this, there's many things going on simultaneously and you're trying to get as many of them in as possible.

JT LEROY, BEHIND THE CLOSED DOOR

BY: So what are you working on now? I see you're interested in JT Leroy--

SS: I'm doing a bunch of different things. I'm doing a movie about Diane Arbus, the photographer. With Erin Wilson writing, off the biography by Patricia Bosworth.

BY: A helluva project.

SS: It's a helluva project. What's interesting is her evolution into the artist that we know from the artist that we don't know. And I'm working on a script with Will Rokos ["Monster's Ball" co-writer], and doing an A.M. Holmes novel called "Music for Torching." From the producers who did "Virgin Suicides" and "Buffalo 66."

BY: I must say, "Buffalo 66," I mean everybody knows Vincent Gallo is out of his mind, but that was a terrific little movie.

SS: It was fantastic. The beauty of that movie is Gallo, not just the performance But what he did [directing], just awesome. Awesome.

BY: And you're talking with JT Leroy too?

SS: Well, I have an idea. Gus Van Sant was going to do "Sarah," and now he's no longer gonna do "Sarah," and JT wants me to do it, and I want to do. And I'm basically looking for somebody to put up a little bit of money to option the book and develop the script. Low-budget minimum. But It's just, you know, people read that book and they look at me like, [Laughs] Who's going to go see this movie?

SS: Yeah, that's what I'm interested in. I feel like a lot of the things I've been sent since "Secretary"--I had a meeting at Warner Bros the other day--I feel like, You should go get somebody else to do this, you don't need me. It's very hard--even scripts of potentially substantial subject matter, like "Memoirs of a Geisha," Hollywood producers are aiming dead down the middle. Even if they have a piece of material that could be so much more. So it's frustrating. Makes me operate where I am. I'm interested in the private intimate moment, the hidden scene behind the closed door. I want to do a movie in a therapist's office, about therapy--

BY: But there've been lots of movies with therapy in them.

SS: But never a real one.

Look for the DVD and VHS of Secretary this may in stores.

Barry Yourgrau is the star and co-writer of the film, "The Sadness of Sex," based on his book. His most recent book is "Haunted Traveller."